We Can Watch 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' in India, But I Am Not Sure We Deserve to

If your idea of a good movie is a slickly-mounted feel-good story, then don’t go watch The Voice of Hind Rajab. Don’t go if you are looking for cathartic high tragedy, or a ringing paean to undying courage or preternatural fortitude. And by all means don’t go if you hope to see good slaying evil.

But no matter what you expect out of Hind Rajab, you will be shocked, perhaps shocked into silence. And shattered. It is one of the most harrowing viewing experiences you are ever likely to encounter. At least one viewer found the film numbing.

And yet it’s a supremely well-made movie, assured and poised. Director Kaouther Ben Hania has audaciously woven her narrative – for once, the word ‘narrative’ feels so utterly inappropriate here! – around an original audio track some seventy minutes long, and in doing so has created a film of inextirpable authenticity and urgency. Some film purists will no doubt quibble about this ‘hybridisation’ of technique where real-life audio holds up a staged drama, but that’s just that – quibbling.

The Voice of Hind Rajab belongs to a genre ordinarily called docudrama, and, in a docudrama, how the filmmaker chooses to shuffle her building blocks around is entirely her call. So long as she stays true to her subject, it’s only the quality of her representation that matters, not how her collage is created.

A true story from January 2024

And Ben Hania stays scrupulously true to her story – indeed a true story from January 2024. A five-year-old Palestinian girl is trapped inside a car devastated by Israeli gunfire in Gaza. Everyone in the family she was travelling with is killed instantly in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) attack, but for a slightly older cousin who manages to briefly call for help before she also dies, leaving little Hind Rajab utterly alone and distraught. She picks up the call from Red Crescent volunteers planning a rescue, and much of the rest of the film is taken up with Red Crescent desperately trying to organise an ambulance to pick her up, while its members talk to her all the while to comfort the scared little girl before help can reach her.

Even though her location is a mere eight minutes’ drive from the only available ambulance, the rescuers are required to navigate an endless protocol of  IDF clearances for the mission, absent which the ambulance is likely to be promptly blown up by the IDF. The clearances are an excruciatingly long, multi-layered process, and little Hind’s morale is sinking all the while, with gunfire all around her and an Isreali tank menacingly closing in on her vehicle. Once IDF, clearly grudgingly, gives the go-ahead, Red Crescent then has to move to securing a safe passage for the ambulance, which in turn involves another interminable series of ‘coordinations’ with multiple other players on the combat scene.

Several hours pass, it’s dark already, and again and again the little girl is heard imploring: “I’m so scared.  It’s dark here. Please come get me.” – Finally, an ambulance with two paramedics starts out on the rescue. They make their way painfully through the wrecked landscape, approach the car in which Hind Rajab is hiding – before they are blown up by the IDF. Hind Rajab dies, too. Subsequent investigations were to show that the Hind Rajab family car bore no fewer than three hundred bullet marks.

That’s all the movie is about. There’s no overt violence here, no fighting, except for gunfire echoes heard through the phone line to Hind Rajab. Four Red Crescent workers are caught in the searing tragedy of a failed rescue after agonising over their options – or rather, the absence of options – for hours, even as a scared little girl keeps begging them for help. Their infuriating predicament gets to each of these four Red Crescent workers – Rana Faqih, Omar Alqam, Mahdi Aljamal and Nisreen Qawas – at different points during the ordeal.

Each wrestles with it their own way, with increasing frustration and rising rage, until the possibility that the ambulance may finally reach Hind Rajab unites them in a common hope for their little friend’s safety. Only for that hope to be then destroyed in a trice, almost mockingly, by a ruthless occupier. With everyone on the screen left holding their heads in their hands, one of the most gut-wrenching moments in film history hits the viewer between the eyes.

But Ben Hania never allows her sense of horror to run away with her. With virtuoso little touches, she etches the dissimilar character traits of the four workers and suggests the contrasting dynamics of their relations with one another. Even in the film’s most intense sequences, she can gently chaff a character: like when she shows Nisreen, the counsellor, trying to calm a colleague’s frayed tempers in exactly the same formulaic, though perfectly well-meaning, manner as she later tries to soothe a despairing Hind Rajab.

A matter of eternal shame for India’s film censors

Through a few quick, deft strokes, Ben Hania establishes Rana as a deeply compassionate young woman who stays on in her post after her shift has ended, and does so without a second thought, because a developing human tragedy breaks her heart. The film’s editing is masterly all through.

It’s to the eternal shame of India’s film censors that they had blocked The Voice of Hind Rajab’s release in the country for a full three months, reportedly because the screening might ‘rupture India’s relations with Israel’. This, despite the movie having won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival, 2025, where, post its screening, it received an unprecedented 23-minute standing ovation. Or that it had won awards at many other festivals across the world including at Chicago, San Sebastian and Hamptons.

Or that it had been nominated for the Oscar as the Best International Feature, and at the BFI London film festival as the best film. One suspects that the censors finally greenlighting the film now may have had something to do with the outcome of the US-Israeli war on Iran, an outcome that the Indian government had never bargained for.

One must also confess to a sense of dismay as one watched The Voice of Hind Rajab in a theatre during the very first week of its run in India, when no more than twenty viewers were present in a movie hall that can seat two hundred and fifty. And it was a Sunday in one of India’s most proudly liberal, indeed cosmopolitan, cities. Sitting in the theatre, one sensed that the censors may have been right to block the film, after all. We as a nation don’t deserve great art. Not any more.

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